As 3rd Generation (3G) systems are widely applied, the number of users increases constantly and the traffic volume grows every month. Driven by the rapid growth of services, higher requirements are imposed on the capacity, coverage, and quality of the networks. The current 3G network coverage status shows that the indoor coverage of 3G systems, especially home coverage, is weak.
A femtocell base station is a small-sized, low-power, plug-and-play home base station. Femtocell base stations are designed for personal consumption and are available in large quantities. Therefore, femtocell base stations need to be free of maintenance or require maintenance from operators as little as possible. In terms of access technology, femtocell base stations need to support automatic data configuration, automatic detection and control of interference, automatic clock synchronization, and automatic planning and optimization.
In the automatic planning and optimization of femtocell base stations, automatic neighbor cell planning is a core function. In practice, a femtocell base station detects macro cell information in the environment through a receiver and configures the detected macro cells as its neighbor cells. The correctness of neighbor cell configuration directly determines the handover performance of a network made up of femtocell base stations. Due to the restriction of the installation position of the femtocell base station, the scope of detection is not exactly the same as the scope of coverage. Therefore, it is possible that the femtocell base station fails to detect a macro cell for a handover, thus causing a call drop.
In the conventional femtocell base station receiver based neighbor cell configuration method, parameters are manually configured for each femtocell base station by using a tool.
During the implementation of the foregoing technical solution, however, the inventor finds a certain disadvantage in the technical solution. Because femtocell base stations are in large quantities and their installation positions cannot be controlled in advance, manual parameter configuration for each femtocell base station is hard to implement.